BOOK REVIEW: RAPH BROUS
King Of The Cross
By Mark Dapin, Pan Macmillan, $32.99 (rrp)

THE Jewish gangster has long featured in the American cultural landscape, with real-life mobsters Bugsy Siegel, Longy Zwillman and Meyer Lansky inspiring fiction by celebrated Jewish authors from E L Doctorow to Philip Roth.

Genre crime writing works best when portraying a city’s seedy underbelly: think James Elroy’s Los Angeles, James Lee Burke’s New Orleans or Carl Hiassen’s Miami. To these literary locales, we can now add Mark Dapin’s Sydney.

King of the Cross, Dapin’s debut novel, tells the life story of Jacob Mendoza, the Jewish underworld supremo of Kings Cross.

Unmistakably modelled upon the late “Boss of the Cross” Abe Saffron, Mendoza is a colourful, unhinged narrator whose lewdness is matched by the brutality of his exploits.

Mendoza, aged in his 80s, tells his tale to Anthony Klein, a British journalist who has relocated to Sydney for a short-lived job with The Australian Jewish Times.

Mendoza relates his autobiography from his Bondi birth in 1920 up to his notoriety as a ruthless criminal powerbroker with an enduring love of yiddishkeit.

Simultaneously, the brash, cocaine-addled Klein is drawn into the criminal intrigue of Mendoza’s empire, involving violent Russian mobsters and a litany of alluring women.

The commercial success of Chopper Read’s memoirs and the Underbelly books suggests that many Australians are fascinated by our bloody criminal history.

Dapin reveals that although the small Jewish community is better known for its doctors and lawyers, Australian crime history features ruthless gangsters who went to Hebrew school, who mourned the Ukrainian pogroms, and who attended minyanim for their fallen criminal mates.

As befitting a former editor of men’s magazine Ralph, Dapin relishes four-letter words, hard-boiled descriptions of sex, and dialogue that would be better suited to an illegal brothel than the Hakoah Club.

Dapin is an observant student of Kings Cross, its sleepless tapestry of thugs, petty crooks and standover men, transsexual hookers, bull-necked bouncers and drunken backpackers.

Mendoza’s story is an Australian-Jewish experience that some readers may find unsettling, especially those who prefer to read about the aforementioned doctors and lawyers.

Dapin’s bullish prose is unlikely to satisfy devotees of fine literature, and the characterisation does not approach the thematic depths of the best contemporary fiction.

But Dapin is obviously not trying to make the Booker Prize ­shortlist.

King of the Cross is an engaging re-imagining of the Abe Saffron legend, wrapped into the author’s astute portrait of Jewish Sydney and the timelessly seedy street culture of Kings Cross.

A compelling, well-researched, original new voice in Australian crime fiction.

Raph Brous is a Melbourne-based writer. His debut novel, Voices in the Park, will be published in 2010.

https://www.jewishnews.net.au/lively-tale-in-streets-of-kings-cross/10407